What is a Customer Journey Map and why is it important?

What is a Customer Journey Map and why is it important?

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Customer Journey map is a process to visualize and empathize with your customers in order to understand the journey or touchpoints that the user goes through to complete the task or tasks.

The focus is not to create perfect or lay down every interaction the user has with your product or employees, instead it is about getting a holistic view of your customer experience through the lens of the customer.

In order to get started, these are some of the prerequisites which can help build an effective Customer Journey Map: User Research, Persona, and Data Insights

Activity is the actions that the user takes during that stage. It can also include what user is thinking.

Touchpoint

Touchpoint can be interaction with the company’s products, services or its employees.

Experience

It is about empathizing with your customer and getting a better understanding of their emotion when interacting with your product or services.

It is also important to have qualitative and quantitative feedback about the experience. Quantitative will help you understand the current state using metrics and qualitative will help with the understanding of the human emotions.

Opportunity

It is about listing the opportunities for improvement to enhance the customer experience. It can be gaps or challenges the customer is facing during a touchpoint or it can be an upsell opportunity.

Customer Journey Map Template & Examples

Please feel free to download the Customer Journey Map Template and customer journey map example to help you better understand the process.

Why is Customer Journey Map Important?

Here are some of the ways we have seen organizations benefit from customer journey mapping:

Alignment across the board

One of the biggest impacts of the customer journey map is that it brings the internal stakeholders on the same page and educates them on how the customer views their product and services.

This is important as a lot of times stakeholders and product owners bring in their biases and already have perspective on how they think the customer interacts with their product. This is especially true when being part of a large organization, their customer interactions have been limited to a certain project or department.

When a stakeholder or a product owner sees the holistic view of the customer journey, it helps in changing their perspective on how the customer interacts with their product and services.

Also, it helps them realize the importance of their department and the impact a good experience can make on the overall journey of the customer. This is also true in the case of co-founders when each of them has a different perspective on their customers, this helps them gain alignment.

Deeper Customer Insights

Having the deeper customer insights can help address challenges the customers are facing with the product or services. Resulting in identifying the touchpoints where there is maximum friction and struggles, thus focusing on improving these can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Opportunity to increase top-line growth

When stakeholders or product owners see the holistic view using the customer journey map, they also see opportunities where they are missing upsell opportunities. As during the customer journey, it becomes easy to identify which touchpoint should they focus to upsell products or services to the user to ensure where they are more likely to convert, resulting into direct impact to the top line growth.

Create a unified experience across multiple services and products

As the company grows, products and services being offered by the company will grow resulting in different experiences for the user when interacting with their products.

This can occur due to several reasons:

Changes in Senior Management

Products being managed in isolation

Certain products getting better funding while others are being left behind

Many more reasons depending on the organization

This will help the organization unify the experience that the customers will receive from all its products and services, resulting in a stronger brand and more growth through referrals. As the statement is true – your current customers can also become your best salesmen 🙂

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What Next

Idea Theorem is Toronto based UI UX Agency. We create simple and usable products for web and mobile. Our human-centered design approach lets us understand your customers, identify their pain points & deliver solutions that enhance their experience with your brand. Contact Us if you have any questions and we will be happy to help you.

About Us

Idea Theorem is one of the top user experience design firms in Canada. We focus on mobile app design, web design and web development. Once the digital product is ready for launch, we help put together a digital marketing plan in order to connect with the target audience.